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Play a video in the browser that is being updated in the background?
Hi there, I hope you all are doing well!
I have a video that's being encoded with some FFmpeg flags applied to it in the MKV format, that's running in the background. I'm working on a type of web panel that would preview the video as it's being encoded from MKV to MKV (with new FFmpeg flags).
I've managed to make a Node.js HTTP Streaming script using the tutorial How to Code a Video Streaming Server using NodeJS.
However, it seems like the video is not updating the new content and stops playing after 1 second or so. I've tried to push in new content through pipes however I had no luck (using watchers such as fs.watchFile and test intervals).
Maybe @yoursunny has a solution? 
Hoping someone can guide me on the right path, thanks!
Thanked by 1yoursunny
Comments
Knowing how your stuff is set up would help us a lot here.
Are you streaming the files as you go with
Transfer-Encoding: chunkedor similar sending new file parts as and when you detect them withfs.watchFile()?Does
fs.WatchFile()even emit events on partial writes? I never used it directly, but I knowchokidardoes so only when files are closed.Why not HLS?
Ffmpeg can output in HLS format directly.
I am trying this out, but is there a way to keep pushing in new segments? I assume if I write to the master file the player should automatically pick up these changes?
I'm sure that's easily achievable. Here are 2 working examples from my snippets. I don't remember all the flags (used it for restreaming 2 years ago) take these as a starting point and polish as necessary:
ffmpeg -re -i input.mp4 -c copy -segment_list_flags +live -hls_time 4 -hls_list_size 6 -hls_wrap 6 -segment_list_type m3u8 -map 0:0 -map 0:1 -segment_time 4 /var/www/hls/index.m3u8If you need to pipe into ffmpeg then command should look like this:
commamd | ffmpeg -re -i pipe: -c copy -segment_list_flags +live -hls_time 4 -hls_list_size 6 -hls_wrap 6 -segment_list_type m3u8 -map 0:0 -map 0:1 -segment_time 4 /var/www/hls/index.m3u8ffmpeg can also take a named pipe as input.
Also found this tutorial in my bookmarks which can help for better understanding:
https://www.martin-riedl.de/2018/08/24/using-ffmpeg-as-a-hls-streaming-server-part-1/